Bliss

I have an acquaintance, he is a priest. Cynical atheist chumming with a genuine fucking Christian priest, odd, ain’t it? I like him a lot, because I can discuss God with him. We have very amusing conversations. We are both amused by our respective viewpoints. You know what he says? He loves talking to atheists, because they generally know more about God than believers. In general, he said, believers mostly simply believe, and it is the atheists and agnostics of the world who actually think about God. He sees it as an intellectual challenge, discussing God, and I must say that we have reached an agreement, in the latter stages of our drunken discussions: that there are moments of bliss.
Wether God exists or not, there are moments of bliss. Moments where human beings believe that everything is all right. Everything is perfect… well, maybe not everything, but the moments of bliss transcend every worldly concern. You are in tune with the world and the moment is perfect, even if your whole life is not.
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced such moments, but I have. Actually, I feel bliss every time I am in the forest by the river and see a pair of crows chasing a buzzard away. It’s nature at its most basic that gets my goat every time. My breast expands, I take a deep breath, and I feel as one with the world. So, is that God? My acquaintance says it is, he says that those are the moments when I am near God. Well, if you want to call it being near God, that’s fine with me, as long as you don’t expect me to chime in on the same note. I say those are the moments when I simply feel good because evolution has seen to it that I enjoy being in nature. My ancestors were forced to be in nature for millions of years, it’s the normal state of being for humans. And when I see how the buzzard tries to find the crows’ nest, and how they are on his ass in a trice, I just know, deep down inside, that this is the way of things, and that it is right.

Right? Right, you ask, what’s „right“ about it then? It’s natural, that’s all. There are no complicated philosophical concepts behind it. And no God either. It’s the way things have been for millions of years, basic natural patterns, and it is ingrained in our genetic makeup to understand it, because we’ve been living with it for millions of years. To put it simply, it’s what we’re used to on the most basic human level. And humans always somehow get to like what they are used to, given time. A damned long time we’ve had for it, too. The time the human race has spent living separated from nature the way so many of us do nowadays is utterly insignificant in comparison.
Listening to Komine, by Habib Koité and Bamada.

Have Some Fun

It’s later than you think. Soon you will die, oh so soon. It’s just a matter of years. Those little short years, you’ve surely noticed how fast they go? So have some fun, live it full, tell your love that you are hers, or his, as the case may be. Fill your cup to the brim, because it may be your last.
We all have to go some time. A man I know is about to go. He ain’t all that old, but hell, cancer sits in ’im, and he has to go. He’s not the first I’ve seen go. Good people… they go just as fast as the bad, if not faster. Will I be there, at the burial? No, but I’ll honor him in any case, in my way.
So, you get older, and you notice how people die. People you know. Whether it’s the people you look up to, the mentors, or people you got to know in passing… they all go. A few of them are left, and at some point you start to wonder when you are next, when you are the one they knew who went down.
That’s life. That’s normal. Life is death is life is death… and we are all made of stardust. There is no life that wasn’t made of death. The atoms of which you are made are recycled. Nature doesn’t waste a single fucking one of them. You are a mouse, a stone, a star, a bloody fucking porcupine. A part of you is a bird, that flew so far and wide. A part of you is lava, that was thrown so high… perhaps, at one point, you traveled, as a little stone, from deep in the earth, over thousands of years, to the surface of this beautiful planet. Or you were the stratosphere. You were air. Does it matter?

So there is nothing to complain about. You will die, as you have died before, a thousand times, in one form or another, whether you were inanimate or not. This is not religion, you little fuck, this is nature. The atoms you are made of are (nearly) indestructible. And, even if I could destroy the atoms you are made of, the atoms are made of something else, smaller yet, which can not be destroyed.
So you are a beautiful creation, indestructible. You had to be. But you are a part of the whole. You are indestructible only in the absolute, natural sense. Nature will reorganize you, will use you, will disperse you according to „her“ stochastical „needs“.
Why is nature female? Because she is the source of life. There are animals which do not rely on females to produce offspring, but human beings do. So for us, feeling, living, squirming little animals that we are, life and the creation of life is inevitably a female thing.
As a man, I am in awe of women. Not all of them, I’ll admit. There are some I could dispense with entirely. But then, I can say the same of men. But I digress, as so often. What I wanted to say is: I worship women because they can brew life. They bake babies, and that is insanely wonderful and definitely worth envying. It is amazing. It throws me for a loop, dammit, it shoves me off the stool on to the floor… I sit there on my ass and am amazed. Amazed. It’s insane, this ability, it’s like: KAZAM! Crazy. Impossible. Something out of a nutty science-fiction novel. And women can do it, just like that, like nothing. They don’t even have to try. I know that they couldn’t do it without men to inseminate them, but nevertheless… I’ve seen a woman give birth; I saw my son come out, so I know what the hell I am talking about. The simple fact that women can produce babies sets them on a higher level in my eyes. It makes them worthy of worship.
Too bad I have no female to worship at the moment.